Lunch yesterday at Wendy’s near USC (a large #7 combo with a small chili). I was wandering away from the counter with my tray when the server asked, as if he knew me from somewhere: “Are you a producer?” “A producer?” He hadn’t said what sort of producer, but this is LA, so it was ...

I was struck by this piece in Cinematical, for two reasons. Firstly, the piece in the Onion A.V. Club which it references is, after some preamble, in praise of The Rocketeer, a film I’ve always thought had a rough deal. Notwithstanding some slightly bland casting, it’s inventive, playful, and wonderful to look ...

[A few months ago, a friend, who is an ordained minister, asked what I thought about a piece at salon.com, which is an interview by Steve Paulson with James Carse, who ran the Religious Studies program at NYU for 30 years, about his book The Religious Case Against Belief. A lot of the issues are ...

[Copying here a comment I just posted to a piece by Mark Lawson on the Guardian website, which seems to me a perfect example — as the first commenter testily notes — of the borderline ignorance of the scientific model among even the best and brightest of those whose intellectual centres of gravity are in ...

To Vons, a few nights ago, to buy some old-fashioned incandescent filament light bulbs, because the batch of long-life fluorescent bulbs we got at Costco a few months ago lend our living room the snug, inviting glare of a car parts warehouse. Standing, slightly baffled, in front of the display, it took me a few ...

I always knew I had no small talk, and now I know I’ve got no big talk either. — Sue Townsend, The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole I feel like I’ve grown up with Adrian Mole. We’re roughly the same age, and I have a nagging suspicion that I have more of his pretentiousness than ...

I tend to be sceptical of the rose-tinted nostalgia which encourages us to regard certain periods of the past as golden ages (reserving particular bile for the entire reactionary ‘Greatest Generation’ construction). I do genuinely fear for the future of the BBC, though. Partly the stakes are so high, so ...

Bill Hicks wasn’t funny. Lenny Bruce wasn’t funny. Okay, some caveats up front: In the absence of any meaningful objective measure of funny, what I mean is that I didn’t/don’t find Carlin funny myself. His stuff — and Hicks’s, and Bruce’s, etc. — doesn’t make me laugh. Also, what ...

There’s something apt-to-the-core about the rebuttal to theists who insist on misrepresenting atheism as a religion, or something akin to a religion, that, if atheism is a religion, then not collecting stamps is a hobby. However, while this identifies the theoretical heart of atheism as the absence of a specific ...

One of those trucks which serve as mobile billboards sat at the kerbside as I went to buy some toilet paper (the Scott 1000-sheet rolls, since you ask – I’m an enthusiastic convert). This one was advertising Silver Reign. It said: Free admission if you mention this truck. Trying to imagine exactly how I would ...